My experiences with Mutt to date: Suggestions for overcoming some issues

[boB Stepp]

On 21/02/14 10:52AM, Cameron Simpson wrote:
>On 12Feb2021 23:20, boB Stepp <robertvstepp at gmail.com> wrote:

>>something I like working with notmuch.  I wish I could use notmuch's tagging
>>capabilities from within Mutt in the sense of adding multiple tags to a single
>>email or a set of tagged emails.  But the only example of an approach is to
>>try to adapt the macro I cited earlier in this thread which deletes the inbox
>>tag.  I see how to modify this to do *one* tag, but that would be hard-coded
>>and not very flexible or useful.  I'm sure there must be a way to write a
>>macro to allow for me to enter multiple tags for notmuch, but I don't know
>>enough about Mutt macros to see a way forwards yet.
>
>"notmuch tag" itself accepts multiple tags. Write a small shell script
>to prompt for the tags to change (in the same form as notmuch expects
>i.e. +tag and -tag) which then invokes notmuch.
>
>If you mean this macro:
>
>    macro index <F6> \
>     "<enter-command>set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode
>      my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key<enter>\
>       <pipe-message>notmuch-mutt tag -- -inbox<enter>\
>        <enter-command>set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode
>         wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key<enter>" \
>          "notmuch: remove message from inbox"
>
>it:
>
>    - saves the pipe_decode and wait_key settings, and turns them off
>    - pipes the current message through notmuch-mutt to remove the
>      "inbox" tag
>    - restores the old pipe_decode and wait_key settings
>
>The $my_blah= is a standard mutt hack because there's no "push temporary
>setting or value", and there are no settings called my_*. So people use
>$my_blah for "user variables".
>
>Piping the whole message through notmuch lets notmuch-mutt get the
>message-id in order to know which item to tag or untag. The it passes
>"id:$mid" to notmuch, where $mid is the message id.
>
>That's the mechanism.

This is all starting to make sense.  With the suggestions below I think I
might be able to attack this.  Many thanks, Cameron!

>To tag things interactively you have 2 issues:
>- specifying the messages to tag
>- specifying the tag changes
>
>For the latter I'd have a shell script which prompted for that, then ran
>notmuch.
>
>For the former, from inside mutt, I'd think there are 2 ways forward.
>With a single message you can just pipe it straight into the script,
>like the above macro does. With multiple messages I think I would tag
>them, and pipe all of them _separately_ through the script.
>
>Now, there are some ways to make that more convenient, particularly
>these settings:
>
>    set auto_tag=yes
>    set pipe_split=yes
>
>auto_tag=yes causes mutt to apply commands to all tagged messages (if
>any) or just the current message (if nothing tagged).
>
>pipe_split=yes causes mutt to run separate pipes per message when it
>pipes multiple messages, instead of concatenating them and running one
>pipe. You want that for notmuch-mutt.
>
>The notmuch-mutt script in the example above expects exactly one message
>on its input, _entirely_ to grab its message-id. So we want
>pipe_split-yes to invoke the script once for each message.
>
>Regarding prompting, I'd write a script like this (untested):
>
>    #!/bin/sh
>    set -ue
>    echo -n "Enter tags to change (-tag, +tag): " >/dev/tty
>    read tags </dev/tty
>    set -x
>    exec notmuch-mutt tag -- $tags
>
>and stick that in your macro above instead of "notmuch-mutt tag --
>-inbox".
>
>Then you should be able to (mutt) tag some messages and run the macro to
>update the notmuch tags interactively via the above script.
>
>It should be possible to batch this instead of invoking notmuch-mutt
>many times. Since we can't get message-ids out of mutt itself easily
>(hence notmuch-mutt reading the message itself to do that) we could try
>setting pipe_split=no and writing out own script to suck in multiple
>message-ids, then pass them all to "notmuch tag".
>
>You might also benefit from a mutt macro, again via a script like the
>above, to prompt for both tags and (separately) notmuch search terms,
>then to just invoke "notmuch tag" with those, skipping notmuch-mutt
>entirely.
>
>See "notmuch help search-terms" for what you can use.

-- 
Wishing you only the best,

boB Stepp